Katie Rigg-Smith’s best of 2019: Baby Darcy meets WPP AUNZ’s new big boss, Jens Monsees
To end 2019 on a positive note, Mumbrella’s Brittney Rigby asks a number of media agency chief executives to share their best part of the year, both professionally and personally. In the final segment, Katie Rigg-Smith, CEO of Group M agency Mindshare, shares her highlights.
When Katie Rigg-Smith was preparing to meet her new boss, WPP AUNZ’s CEO Jens Monsees, she told him he’d also be meeting Darcy. And the Mindshare CEO’s four-month-old baby was the first person Monsees made a beeline for.
“He came straight over and he’s like, ‘Hi, introduce me to Darcy, we need this, we need this diversity being shown in our business’. Darcy smiled at him, I’m like ‘good child’,” she laughs.
The Media Federation of Australia (MFA), of which Rigg-Smith is a board member, has been equally welcoming. She brought Darcy along to a board meeting, and was overwhelmed by how kind her fellow leaders – MFA chair and Omnicom Media Group CEO Peter Horgan, MFA CEO Sophie Madden, incoming CEO of IPG Mediabrands Mark Coad, APAC CEO of Mediabrands Leigh Terry, Group M CEO Mark Lollback, and others – were to the both of them.
As a fellow mum in the industry, this is to be applauded. However, it is bitter sweet, that in order for babies to be embraced in the office you need to be a CEO / female mum. So whilst change happens from the top, I guess, it saddens me it has taken so long and even Dad CEOs didn’t push for this sooner. And perhaps it is because, it brings about a sense of mourning that myself and other mums needed to suppress our mum identity to be taken seriously at work to get ahead in our career and day-dreamed about being able to bring in our kids to work but instead need to stick them in daycare – and yes mine were babies too when I went back to work full-time. So well-done Kate for forging a new path, showing what diversity really looks like and for being a role model for other mums-to-be.